Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Picked this one up on Carl Zimmer’s The Loom . Since the original reports on the Homo floresiensis remains were published in the fall of 2004 (Brown et al. 2004, Morwood et al. 2004, Falk et al. 2005), there’s been a ton of debate as to exactly what they are. On the one hand, the original team claims that these fossils represent a separate species, on the other, several researchers have since claimed on various grounds that at least the published cranium represents a pathological (specifically microcephalic) individual (e.g., Martin et al. 2006; but cf. Falk et al. 2006). So far, the debate has raged on, with no easy resolution in sight.

Now, a third position on those mysterious hominins has been presented by Gary D. Richards, a grad student at Berkeley's Human Evolution Research Center in a review paper "in press" in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Richards’ take is that the Liang Bua remains simply represent a population of healthy, normal humans that fall at the very edge (maybe even beyond the edge) of the ‘small’ range of variation of Homo sapiens. The Loom presents a good discussion of some of the merits and failings of the paper. I haven’t seen any more discussion about this paper on discussion forums or other blogs yet.

The archaeological dimension of this debate also bears discussing as it highlights a number of issues in contemporary Paleolithic archaeology, but I’ll do so in a later post. In the meantime, keep posted to see what kind of treatment this new take on the hobbits will get in the ongoing debate over the ‘hobbits!’